


we all wander through this shattered old world

by DiscoCritic



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Everyone But Party Poison Is Dead AU, Not RPF, Other, The Fabulous Killjoys (Danger Days) Are Not MCR
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:40:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26051302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscoCritic/pseuds/DiscoCritic
Summary: Imagine a road that stretches forever. Just miles and miles of road and nothing to break up the endless expanse of asphalt besides the cotton-soft clouds overhead and the tired bushes that bend weakly in the wind. Maybe some mountains stand tall in the distance and the road cuts right through them, or maybe a breeze dances by every now and then. Maybe the air smells hot and scorching, like the sunlight, or maybe there’s a vague scent of burning rubber every thousand feet.Now imagine a person walking down this road, with no sign of where he's come from or, really, even where he's going. Looking down on him from above, he’s nothing more than a speck on a never-ending freeway. He’s in the middle of nowhere and walking down a road all alone, and he’s heading toward the setting sun.
Relationships: fun ghoul/party poison (mentioned)
Comments: 21
Kudos: 28





	we all wander through this shattered old world

**Author's Note:**

> trying out a new style! no one’s names are mentioned in this, but skip down to the end notes for a reference on who’s who if you’re still confused by the end. 
> 
> a few warnings: 
> 
> \- animal death (a coyote corpse is seen decaying on a road)  
> \- mentions of both fatal car and motorcycle crashes  
> \- a few brief mentions of alcoholism  
> \- a brief paragraph contemplating self-inflicted eye trauma, but the ideas are not acted upon

Imagine a road that stretches forever. Just miles and miles of road and nothing to break up the endless expanse of asphalt besides the cotton-soft clouds overhead and the tired bushes that bend weakly in the wind. Maybe some mountains stand tall in the distance and the road cuts right through them, or maybe a breeze dances by every now and then. Maybe the air smells hot and scorching, like the sunlight, or maybe there’s a vague scent of burning rubber every thousand feet. 

Now imagine a person walking down this road, with no sign of where he's come from or, really, even where he's going. Looking down on him from above, he’s nothing more than a speck on a never-ending freeway. He’s in the middle of nowhere and walking down a road all alone, and he’s heading toward the setting sun. 

Now zoom in on the scene. Get a better picture. This person walks slowly but with a purpose, stringy hair blanketing over his eyes and dusting the base of his neck. His shoulders hunch over the slightest bit and he walks with a limp that's only noticeable if you take a long look at his hobbling gait. There’s a few holes in the knees of his jeans and his black boots are scuffed. 

He breathes in and out with every few steps, a soldier marching to the sound of his own oxygen intake. Sweat rolls down his face and neck in beads and soaks the fabric of his t-shirt, but shade is nowhere to be found and it wouldn't help anyway. His jacket, the one that fits him like a second skin, has already been peeled off and slung over one shoulder. His hair is damp with sweat and he allows himself to think of a cold ice pop on his tongue for five seconds. Five seconds, that's all, and then he has to shake the imaginary taste from his mouth and set his sights on the sun again. 

He’s wearing a bracelet. It sits nestled between a red hair band and the bump of his wrist bone. He has not taken it off since the day he put it on two years ago, and since he started his journey down this endless road, he's touched two fingers to it once. No more than that or tears will spring up and he'll have to convince himself that there's something in his eye, because he can't be crying. Leaders don't cry, and that's what this person is, a leader. Maybe ‘was’ is the better word, because he’s got nobody left to lead, but you get the point. 

And he knows leaders don't cry, not good ones. Not that he's a good one, but that's not important. 

Remember that road you were imagining? The endless road? It only runs as far as a person needs it to go. If you need to take a nighttime trip to the nearest convenience store for a bag of chips and a can of beer, it goes half a mile to the nearest convenience store that stocks bags of chips and cans of beer. If you need a hospital, all roads come together into one long highway that stops right at the front door of the closest hospital with the most skilled doctors and nurses you can find.

It only becomes endless—the way it is now—when a mind needs to be cleared and driving or walking is the most practical way to do that. Left foot, right foot. One in front of the other. Most of the time, the traveler on the road figures out whatever it is that's stuck on their mind and veers off somewhere, but every now and then there’s one that never lets go. Stays on that road until the end of time because they can’t figure out what the fuck they’re supposed to do. 

Just like him, the person on the road right now, limping through. He keeps going. It’s not like he has anywhere better to be.

As he makes his way along, he stumbles across something dead lying in front of a pothole right in the middle of his path. It's so charred, fried by the sun, cooked inside and out, that it can't be recognized. He wouldn't have stopped to mourn it even if it hadn't been, though. He’s not that kind of person. 

Fragments of a song dance through his head as he steps over it, and he hums along. He only ever hums when he's alone now, and he never sings anymore. The last time he sang was eight months ago and he sang a song to a dying lover. It hurts too much to dwell on it right now, so he doesn't. Just keeps on walking while the sweat drips off his face and sizzles behind him in the road. 

He carries nothing in his pockets but two coins, a blue bandanna, and a tarnished locket caked in dirt. A raygun sits securely in its holster and it's out of battery, but if he tried to fire it, a searing laser would still shoot out all the same. One of the benefits of being a favorite of the powers above. 

But he won't fire it. He doesn't mess with destiny like that. Not anymore. 

Zoom out a little. Imagine the color of his hair. The ends are dyed a fading red but the rest is a plain brown shade, just dark enough to be mistaken for black. He used to have a brother once, younger by a few years and taller by a few inches. The brother was the one with the black hair, even though he always bleached it blond. 

Funnily enough, the lover, the one he sang to, died just days after that brother, and before the brother came the loss of a best friend. In fact, within three months, the four most important people in his life were gone. The only four people that could bring out the better side of him. 

When the last one was snatched away—the little girl—he thought he was going to die too, just by sheer chance if not simply from the heartache of it all. But he didn’t. The world was too cruel to let that happen. Mercy killing was not something it knew, not for him. 

He glances down at the hair band around his wrist now and thinks of the person who gave it to him. Tall, with a smile that could light up even the darkest, coldest shelter, with big gentle hands that stitched him up more than once when he couldn't do it himself. The only person that could ever coax away his rough outer layers and expose the raw red emotion underneath. The only person he trusted enough to share his deepest insecurities with. A best friend. 

Left foot, right foot. The memories are coming back, trickling piece by piece now, but the dam is about to burst and he knows for a fact that when it does, he'll fall to his knees and there's no guarantee he'll ever manage to get back up.

One by one, they left him.

He won't think about it. He won't think about that now that he’s all alone, the days all blend together, crawling by like an eight-legged spider (no, he won't think about spiders either; he won't think about the spider emblem on the front of his old trans am, the trans am that he and those four people all shared and spent countless days and nights riding around in together when it got too hot or cold to do anything else). He won't think about how the life of a loner is just that, _lonely._

No, he won't think about any of it.

Left, right. One step after another. He hasn’t rested or eaten or had a single swallow of water in three days, and though logic is screaming that he should be dead on his feet right now, he feels nothing but mild discomfort. His mind overpowers what little fatigue he does have and forces him to keep walking.

Because he's heard all the legends. He knows he'll keep walking until this route through a harsh, unforgiving desert finally ends and deposits him in the place he's supposed to be or until he's _really_ dead on his feet. Either way, neither of those things will happen if he stops.

He passes by a broken branch shattered into pieces on the side of the road. The nearest Joshua tree is seven hours behind him, but he doesn't stop to wonder where it could’ve come from. 

A bitter laugh tears through his lips when he takes a second to think about it. He's like that branch in the way that they're both snapped in half, one end hanging onto the other by nothing more than a little hope or determination. A broken person and a broken branch.

Left foot, right foot. His ankle starts to act up again, the one that caused the limp in the first place all those years ago, but he pushes through it. It’s a strange kind of determination for someone who’s just a weary traveler taking step after step on a long desert road. A traveler that’s been dealt far too much damage for a lifetime, maybe two. 

When a cloud passes overhead sometime later, he doesn't look at it. He won't look up anymore. The sky, the stars, the sun—they’re all worth nothing to him now. Symbolic of his mindset, maybe, but really it's just because his neck hurts if he tilts his head up too far. It’s been like that ever since the crash—the crash that killed the black-haired brother.

He remembers that crash just as vividly as if it happened five seconds ago. The beginning of the end was the moment the car flipped and bent in ways metal should never go. He made it out of the wreckage. So did the gentle-handed friend and the lover. So did the little girl.

Not the brother.

No, the brother was trapped in that hunk of flaming machinery that never let him out. That discarded shell of a car became the closest thing to a grave that he ever got, because when the embers died down and the gentle-handed friend worked up the courage to dig inside for anything whole enough to bury, there was nothing but a blackened, mangled body and a wristwatch.

So the person on the road was handed the wristwatch, which is now all he has left of the soft-edged boy who persuaded him to live a little, of the little brother he never really took seriously (not even at the end), and of the brave, strong-willed man who once risked his life in a rainstorm to get medicine for him.

The black-haired brother, reduced to a burned body and a wristwatch. Funny how you can be everything and then suddenly nothing in such little time.

Left, right. 

He coughs and tucks a piece of hair behind his ear, and his dirt-caked hands remind him of his final task before taking his first left-right on this road. He doesn’t want to think about what he did to get this grit under his nails, to have this grime set so deeply in the lines of his palm, but the gold locket tucked away in his jeans weighs down in a permanent reminder. 

It belonged to the lover, who wanted it hidden away with all his memories. Out of sight and out of mind, isn’t that what they say? If that’s true, then why can’t he stop thinking of the four people he managed to lose in three months, huh? Huh?

The chain on the locket is broken and has been like that since the first time he saw the lover pull it out of his pocket. Broken like a tree branch on the side of the road. Broken like him. 

The clasp is broken, too, and if he opened it right now, he knows what he’d find inside. A picture of a woman, wrinkles fused into her forehead, almost smiling but not quite, irises warm and comforting even though dark circles from sleepless nights color her undereyes. _Una rosa_ in her hair to match her name. She’s looking straight into the camera, friendly but intensely, and it’s teetering on the edge of unsettling every time he glances at it. He shoves it back in his pocket after a few seconds. 

Yes, he dug this locket and this woman up. Right from their place underneath the tallest Joshua tree by the abandoned strip mall with its neon lights long burned out. He dug this locket up in the heat of the afternoon three days ago, clawing at the ground one handful at a time and wiping the sweat from his forehead with the bandanna in his pocket until dirt streaked across his whole face. And when the sunlight hit the tarnished face of the locket, he snatched his finding right up and left the hole without refilling it.

It's like he undid a burial, he muses, walking right down the center of that road, head down and arms swinging slightly with each step. Like he waited for the funeral to end and immediately destroyed everything the director had spent days planning. 

But what does it matter? In this world, it means nothing. He's done much, much worse. Digging up a locket is the least of his worries.

Right then, he passes another dead thing but is too caught up in his thoughts to notice it until he kicks the head and trips over it. This body is slightly less decomposed, old enough for bone to peek out but new enough to see the shape of what it once was before the vultures began picking it apart for scraps. A coyote, fur matted with blood and dirt, one glassy black eye staring straight up at him, accusatory. 

He looks away and keeps walking. Left foot, right foot, and he doesn't pay attention to the growing pain in his ankle. Like if he doesn't think about it, it can simply evaporate.

Of course, that doesn't work. It hasn't worked since the day it first flared up all those years ago.

He powers through.

How long can a person walk without rest? He's willing to find out and is almost convinced by now that this road will never end (he’s right on that account) and its only purpose of letting him walk all this way on its path is to capture him. To let him put his first foot on the asphalt and that’s where he’s stuck until it ends. Marching down the road, a soldier without an army or orders. He marches to the pace of his own heartbeat.

Oh, his heartbeat. There was one person who always loved to listen to it. Like a ritual, every time after they would make love, that person would lay his head down on his chest and count the beats. _"I hear it,"_ he would say, _"It's beating like a drum."_

 _"It's beating for you,"_ the person on the road would answer, and place a hand on the lover’s neck. Then he would close his eyes and they would both fall asleep there, in their own little world, contained by the blanket they shared and the feeling of skin against skin. It was something he took for granted at the time, and now that the lover is gone, his heart simply won't thump as strongly as it did before. Maybe because there’s no one there to listen to it.

He hopes that it might just stop sometime soon. Spare him the misery of the memories.

That person, the lover—he was the third to go. And it happened all too slowly and yet all too quickly at the same time.

It wasn't a car crash this time. After the end of the brother, he swore he'd never ride in another car ever again. No, they were on bikes this time. Him and the lover and the little girl. He was with her and the lover had his own.

The tire blew out. The lover lost control, somehow the bike pinned him to the ground, and the hot metal gashed his stomach right over his old ‘X’ scars from a knife fight years ago. By the time the person on the road summoned the strength to shove the bike off and was on his knees beside the lover, it was clear his end was coming.

 _"Hey, baby,"_ he'd whispered, shaking the lover’s shoulder as tears clung to his bottom lashes. _"Open your eyes for me, baby."_

And painfully, slowly, the lover did.

 _"Good job,"_ he'd told him, _"Now listen to me, all right?"_

And the lover mustered a nod.

_"I'm going to sing you a song."_

And that’s why he never sings anymore. He swore to himself that the last song he sang was exactly that: the last song. Singing brings back that memory, the one of dusting his fingers over the lover's cheekbones as he laid there dying. He remembers making it through the first verse without choking up, but as the lover's eyelashes fluttered shut and he saw the effort it took to reopen them, his voice cracked. He gave himself two seconds to break down before moving along with the song, because he wanted the lover to be able to hear it in full one last time.

But he didn't get to. Before the second chorus, the life was stolen from the lover, plucked from his chest as his heart ceased to beat and he took his final breath.

And then, when he had sat there for hours, long enough for the body to cool, the little girl stepped forward. She’d been standing behind them the whole time, silently, saying nothing and only watching. _"Come on,"_ she'd said, and then it was all over, and she wrapped her fingers around his thumb and led him away. And it was just the two of them left.

It shouldn’t have happened. The chances that the lover would lose control of his bike on _that_ day on _that_ road with no passenger or any time to regain control, and that _that_ would be the thing to kill him, just _days_ after the black-haired brother—those were nanoscopic. And yet every detail fell into place so finely. 

He finds himself absentmindedly waving his hand along to the beat of that wretched song and clutches his fingers into a fist to make it stop. If he ever sees another record player, he'll be sure to smash it against the wall. He hopes he never hears a song play ever again.

He thinks he hears a bird caw overheard sometime later, but it wasn't a bird, and he does not care enough to realize this. He just keeps trekking on, shirt soaked in sweat mirroring the way the lover's shirt was soaked in blood. He brings his fist to his mouth and bites down hard on the knuckles to make the stream of thoughts in his head stop.

The skies darken eventually. Clouds roll in and thunder rumbles smoothly in the distance. Is it bad that his first instinct is to look over his shoulder to check on the lover? He was always scared of thunder. Many nights and days were spent with the lover's face pressed into his shirt as if that could save him from the impending fear that rose in his chest every time he saw lightning.

He won't dwell on that. When the sky opens up, his filthy palms reach to the sky and each rain droplet burns like acid. But there is no acid rain; he's simply feeling the pain the lover felt the moment a thunderstorm started. And right now, it's welcome.

He's drenched in twenty seconds. He never stops walking, not when his clothes cling to his body or when water from his hair drips down from his forehead into his eyes. He dries off by the morning and he's still walking. Left foot, right foot.

And when the sun comes up behind him, when its first rays stretch out to greet the morning, he blinks and his hands are wrapped around the straps of a backpack he's sure he wasn't wearing until now. He blinks again and there’s a coyote standing in front of him, but it’s not only any coyote, it's the half-decayed one with the matted fur clinging to its ribs from hours back. It snarls at him, teeth bared, and he just snarls back. 

He blinks and he's flat on his back in the middle of the road, no backpack, no coyote, only silence ringing in his ears and a salty taste in his mouth. There is no other sign of life in sight; all the nearby trees are nothing but branches, husks of what was once there. Brown weeds litter the sides of the road and he starts to wonder if he's dead too. 

He blinks again and nothing ever happened. 

So you know what he does? He just keeps on walking. Left, right, limp and all. 

Nothing happens for a long time, not until a shadow of a bird passes at his feet, and it’s a real bird this time. But he still doesn’t bother to look up. 

You know who always looked up? Every night the stars were out, every single night without fucking fail, the gentle-handed friend would sit on the hood of that trans am they all had and gaze up. 

_"What are you doing?"_ he would ask the friend, who would glance in his direction with a half smile.

 _"Looking for heaven,"_ would come the reply, and the person on the road would shake his head and walk away.

Now, if he saw a star (Star, that was the name of the gentle-handed friend, how fitting), he would swear and spit at the ground. The stars don't deserve the recognition everyone gives them. They're just flaming balls of gas somewhere far away. Nothing special, not when you think about the big picture.

No, the stars aren't worth anything, not to him. But his Star was, the friend. The Star always knew what to say when the person on the road was feeling this way, like he could just keep going and going until he fell dead on the ground (and it's surprising that hasn't already happened), he had the happiest smile, and he was handy with a sewing needle in more ways than one. The Star cared for him, he cared for all of them, and he would always put himself last. In fact, that was the thing that got him, in the end. Handed his blaster to the lover with no hesitation and earned himself three holes in the back of the head when the enemy showed up. No mercy for the gentle-handed friend and no mercy for him, the person walking down the never-ending road.

If the person on the road had a child—and he did, really, in every way but biologically—he could pass down tales of his misadventures. _"It went like this,"_ he'd say, " _First the brother, then the friend, then the lover."_

Left foot, right foot.

But lucky him, he doesn't have a child. He doesn't have a child because he fucking _lost_ her. The real story? _"It went like this,"_ he should say, _"First the brother, then the friend, then the lover, then the child."_

It was an accident, okay? Okay? Leave him alone. Two more months, that's all he had with her once the others were gone, two months where they wandered aimlessly mile to mile, no car, no bike (because you're crazy if you'd think he'd get back on a bike after one look at all that blood soaking the lover's shirt), just on foot. He limped, she bounded along behind him, the pep in her step having returned after a few weeks. She was young, he shouldn't resent that, and children can't spend their lives sulking in the misery and loneliness that he managed to trap himself in. That he's _still_ trapped in, after all these miles on this good old road.

He's growing quite fond of it now. Is that a bad thing? Maybe he’s losing his mind. 

Oh, well. He lost everything and everyone else. Might as well lose his sanity now. 

Another pothole he didn’t notice nearly takes his left foot out and his original opinion of this miserable road returns. He kicks at a loose chunk of asphalt and swears five times before continuing on his way.

Five. Five. She was five. Five years old. Five. She knew five swear words and said them with pride. There's no such thing as a foul mouth when you live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Five years old and stolen back by the enemy.

And it was his fault, it was, and you know why? He'll tell you why. Because he's a fucking loser (left foot) and a failure (right foot) and he was never cut out for watching a kid (left foot again). Because he turned his back one day for a couple minutes too long (right foot), and when he turned back around, hand around the neck of a half-empty bottle (left foot), she was gone.

He knows what happened to her. He knew what was going to happen to her the moment the lover died and he realized he was the only one left to look out for her. He knew that someday the enemy would snatch her back, because he ain't cut out for this shit and it was bound to happen anyway, so why does he feel so bad?

Because he lost the kid, that's why. Because he's an irresponsible piece of shit who can't watch over one kid and deal with the deaths of the three most important people in his life without getting drunk. Because that's all he knows how to do; throw a drink back and the world blurs at the edges and then everything's not so bad anymore, except it is, because he lost a whole kid, and who knows where she is now?

She made him a bracelet. She loved and trusted him and look what he did. Went and lost her.

Right foot, left foot.

He peers down the road where it begins to head downhill, winding a little like whoever laid the asphalt was drunk (like he was when he lost her) but as far as he can see there is nothing but the two aforementioned things: hills and road. Brown, dead hills made up of nothing but bits of rock and bits of dirt. And the road. 

Maybe he'll walk himself to death right here, right now. Maybe it's a better alternative than anything else he could do or anywhere else he could end up. 

Left foot, right foot. It's nighttime. The stars are out. Star. Gentle-handed friend. Dead after three shots in the back of the head. 

It was his fault, the person on the road. If he had been watching more closely, he would've seen them coming. A carful of the enemy. They shot the gentle-handed friend in the head from fifty yards away. Boom! A flash of light. The end of a life. 

He was supposed to be on lookout. He was the one with the gun and he had the best eyes. It was his fault. 

All of it was his fault, in some way, for not watching. The little girl. She wandered away for a minute and then was lost for a lifetime because he wasn't watching. The gentle-handed friend. He was on lookout when the enemy showed up and should have been watching. The brother. The one walking down the road was driving; he should've been watching where he was going. The lover, who was on his bike. The person on the road should’ve been watching what was going on behind him. 

He doesn't use his eyes anymore, hasn't in a while, so why doesn't he just claw them out? Rip them into shreds with his fingernails or scorch them with his blaster? Blind himself so maybe he won't be so hard on himself about not watching out for his crew, because now he really _can't_ look, huh? Not without eyes. Maybe then he wouldn't hate himself so much. 

But no. He needs his eyes to keep watching the road he's walking on. For cars and for the enemy, or for carfuls of the enemy like the one that stole the life from the gentle-handed friend. Though if a car came barrelling down the center line, he's not so sure that he wouldn't just stand there and wait for it.

The stars twinkle up above him. They twinkle one by one, three of them, almost like they're winking. He would shout and yell and shake his fist at the sky, but that wouldn't do any good, so he just bites his tongue and keeps walking. Left, right, left, right. 

He left-rights in silence for a few minutes, thoughts cleared, before snippets of a tune find their way onto his tongue. _One, two, three, four_ , began the song he sang to the lover. He's humming the numbers over and over quietly when he realizes what he's doing and clamps his mouth shut.

Are you still imaging that road? It's over a hundred miles now. According to basic logic, his legs should've given out and he should've died from starvation, dehydration, or exhaustion days ago. But he hasn't. The worst he's experienced so far has been his ever-present limp and that's no different from any other day.

What _is_ different, however, is this road. It's different from the rest of the world because basic rules of logic don't apply once you set foot on this road. A person could walk forever here if they needed to. 

(He needs to.) 

As he goes along with his lips pressed together to stop him from singing, he wonders what it would feel like to walk without a limp. He's had his for so long that now it's just another part of everyday life, but he can vaguely remember a time it wasn't. 

The brother was the one that bandaged it when he first fell and nearly blacked out. He was the one that bandaged it the second time when he tripped over a root in the ground and couldn’t get back up. And he was the one that bandaged it the third time in the dark of night when something tore and he couldn’t fall asleep from the pain. And the fourth, and the fifth, and every other time since then. The brother was always looking out for him when it mattered and even when it didn't. 

But _he_ wasn't looking out for the brother when it mattered for _him,_ though, was he? 

He heaves a sigh and keeps marching down the freeway, shoulders still slumped and hair still stuck to his forehead the same way it was sixty miles ago. He hasn't seen another person in forever. He would talk to himself if opening his mouth wasn't such an effort. The only sounds he's made are the wordless little bars he's hummed throughout his journey.

In another life, none of his crew would've died. They would all still be here with him, and they would be driving down this road in a trans am, _their_ trans am, laughing along with each other and smiling even though their life seldom gave them a reason to do either one. They would make their own happiness, arms thrown casually around necks and chests heaving with laughter. A little girl would be sitting in the backseat with a belt full of bottle caps and pink nail polish drying on her fingernails, begging for another story or for the radio to be turned up. This road would be just like any other ordinary road, a surface for vehicles to glide over smoothly instead of making the treacherous trek across the sand, and no tears would be crawling down anyone's face right now like they are on his. 

He wipes them away. He's not crying. He hasn't cried in six months and he won't start now. 

Oh, he's always been a liar, and a bad one at that. Never could admit the truth when it was something he didn't want anyone to hear or know. Even if the only person around was himself. 

Several times since starting his journey on this road he's wished for this to all be a dream. It might be the worst fucking dream he’s ever had, but then he would get to wake up eventually. Here, there’s nothing to wake up from. This is his new reality, after all. Though he wishes with everything that’s left of his cold, crumbling heart it was nothing but a dream. 

Dreams, dreams... the lover had those. There would be some nights where the person on the road was jarred out of sleep by a desperate hand shaking his shoulder, begging for help, for reassurance, for an anchor in the sea of nightmares. And then there would be other nights, the ones where the only thing to wake him would be a bloodcurdling scream and thrashing and flailing and he would open his eyes sure that someone had just been murdered, but it was really just the lover with tears spilling down his cheeks, stuck in a place between wakefulness and sleep, and the only way to calm the lover down was hold him tight to his chest and whisper to him. 

_"You're safe. Hey, baby, you're safe. I got you, baby, nothing ain’t ever gonna hurt you, not when I’m here."_

Oh, and how he wished those meaningless utterances were true. But the world could never give him the satisfaction of that, could it? Fate was far too well-inclined to toy with him. To leave him the only one still standing, if barely, the only one walking down a road with slumped shoulders and a limp and fragments of a song stuck on his breath.

All he wanted to do was keep him safe. Protect his lover, that’s all he ever wanted to do. He never wanted the love they shared to disappear and he always wanted to be nearby. They were always close; the nights were spent skin-to-skin under old white sheets, always sleeping in each other's arms, and if they could've crawled inside the body of the other to be even an inch closer they would've. The days were spent hand-in-hand and any moment apart was a moment worth mourning for them. They would share kisses and touches, gentle little caresses and whispers, every minute they could.

But none of that love could've kept him alive, huh? Not even if the person on the road would fall to his knees and cry out to the heavens for hours upon hours and beg for his lover back, beg for just one more kiss or one more shared _"I love you."_ Nothing would change.

It's almost if the person on the road’s entire destiny was to find a family and then get left alone again, huh? Right? Maybe because he shouldn’t get a life of happiness. Maybe God or whoever looked down on him and said, _"That one deserves loneliness."_ Maybe they'd looked into the future and seen everything he’d do, all the blood and names on his hands, and simply passed him by.

He'd rather be dead than left alone for the rest of his life, but then again, wouldn't everyone?

Left, right.

Maybe his destiny is just loneliness and an eternal journey down this road. 

And it may look like that from his perspective, but there is something he does not know. 

He does not know that the others (three of them, at least) are walking beside him right this moment. And they would give anything to tell him to keep going. Keep walking. They know his resolution is dying, but if he makes it to the end of the road, everything will change. He won't be this hollow shell of a human with shoulders slumped and a limp, no, his mind will clear and he'll stand straight and his ankle won't hurt as much. They know this, inexplicably, but they have no way of telling him. So they all three just hope.

Three, because the little girl isn't there. It's not yet her time. He doesn't know this, but you do. She has to go on to save the world.

Oh, but the other three, with their ghosts bathed in a transparent glow invisible to the eye—they're right beside him, falling in step with every foot he puts down. The brother slings his elbow around his so they're arm in arm, the lover takes his hand, and the gentle-handed friend walks right behind him and ruffles his hair.

But him, the person on the road, he doesn't know any of this. He doesn't feel their touch or hear their breaths or see their forms, so he just keeps on walking. Left foot, right foot. He simply can't know they're with him, in spirit and in person, in a strange way, so he just keeps heading toward that setting sun with no knowledge of where he's really going. All he's doing is following that never-ending road, and just like he has so many times on this journey, he wants to give up.

But he doesn't give up, just keeps walking towards the sun on that endless road of his, and that must count for something, right?

**Author's Note:**

> the person on the road: party poison  
> the black-haired brother: kobra kid  
> the gentle-handed friend: jet star  
> the lover: fun ghoul  
> (and the girl, as herself) 
> 
> i wrote this while participating in a killjoys word crawl and listening to “the calling” by the killers, though the title comes from “ballad of a prodigal son” by lincoln durham. dunno why i just didn’t use a lyric from boulevard of broken dreams as the title, though. 
> 
> feel free to leave kudos or a comment if you enjoyed, and you can find me at tumblr on @discocritic if you want to send an ask my way! thank you for reading <3


End file.
